Editorial: Mulberry Mayor Accepts Challenge To Advance City

Sometimes small communities complain that they lack the tax base to do the things they would like to do, and sometimes that’s a fair observation.

But we admire the mayor of Mulberry who, instead of asking how the city could get more money, asked how he could do more things to advance the city.

Mulberry is a Crawford County city smaller than eight square miles with a nearly steady population of fewer than 1,700 people. But the visions its mayor has for its future are anything but small.

When he was first elected mayor in 2010 — remember that’s a job with just a two-year contract — Gary Baxter began working with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, an early indicator that he was not going to be an accepting-the-status-quo kind of mayor. So when someone suggested he enroll in the Community Development Institute at the University of Central Arkansas, he was interested immediately, even though he knew he’d need three years to complete the curriculum.

“As an elected official, I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to show people that Mulberry is a great place to raise a family and a great place to live,” Mayor Baxter told the Times Record, according to a report in Monday’s edition.

Winrock International awarded him a grant to take the course, and he was able to stay with his daughter in Conway during the week each year he needed to be in attendance. So all the city had to pony up was some gas money.

Mayor Baxter said as soon as he started the program ways to apply what he was learning began to pop into his head.

“So much of it is in connecting with people and knowing the right places to go for grants, knowing the right people to talk to who have developed their community, who have gotten things in their community to help build their community,” Mayor Baxter said. “You don’t just buy a piece of property and put something there, you plan it out. You plan, ‘How can we develop this? How can we develop where things go in our city?’ And then, ‘What does the community need?’”

He graduated from the CDI with honors and won the Ernest L. Whitelaw Award, given by the students to the graduate who best exemplified the leadership qualities the course fosters, according to Monday’s report.

He’s interested in expanding Mulberry’s industrial park, where he points with pride to recent additions of a Hausner’s pre-cast concrete plant and American Vegetable Soybean and Edamame plant.

“I want to prepare myself to cast a vision for the people of Mulberry, to say, ‘As your mayor, this is where I’m taking you as a community; this is where we’re going and what we’re trying to do,’” he said.

To make sure he’s taking the community where it needs and wants to go, Mayor Baxter now has the ambitious plan of going door-to-door handing out cards asking all the city’s residents their concerns or suggestions for the town. In short, he is planning to be a one-person Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, conducting several hundred tiny meetings in a box.

We wish him and his community the best. If strength of character and hard work will get the city where it wants to be, we expect it will be successful.